I started with an Atari 400 with a BASIC cartridge. ;-) I didn't progress past BASIC for another 8.5 years until I hit university. There they forced me to learn ForTran. Yuck.

It seems that many people here have had their first programming experiences with BASIC, something which I expected, taking into account personal experiences from other people I know. I, for one, did never own a Commodore vic20, nor a C64 or an amiga. I did learn some Pascal at high school, which has its own shortcomings and in which I would never program again, but which at least introduced me directly to structured programming.

Unfortunately I were to be... unfortunate enough (to have) to have my encounter with BASIC. It was at my first university year, and it was the time of 486s and the first generation of Pentiums, but... our graceful Institution gave us a buch of 8088s to program in their ROM-based gwbasic... quite awful! ;-)

The rest of the story: Re: Roads to Perl